Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking last year sometime. It was a bit beaten up from the shelves of Goodwill, but I knew I wanted it. Seeing it there reminded me immediately of how overwhelmed and stunned I had been driving to work one morning in 2005 when a conversation with Didion came on NPR. I drove that morning mouth agape, shoulders heavy with the idea of facing the belongings of loved ones after they've died.

Maybe that's how the book made it to Goodwill, after all.

I was reluctant to read it because I knew it would be heavy. My job is a constant state of stress, the holidays had finally ended, I had just survived PhD applications and our finances were topsy-turvy. On top of that, I got sick for 3 weeks. The last thing I needed to worry about was someone else's grieving process. I read the inside cover to my husband and he looked at me with wide-eyes and shook his head in a silent communiqué that it was, indeed, too intense for my present state.

Yet somehow I picked it up one night before bed and started in. I have been swimming around in theories about autobiography and memoir and it seemed like as good a time as any.

I had never read Didion before, but know that she is well respected by many. She has had a long career as a writer and I felt that she, of all people, would be able to carefully reconstruct a difficult time and make it meaningful to others. And it was...I felt bad for her throughout, but not as bad as I wanted. She didn't want a pity party, and perhaps that is why the collection of thoughts and feelings from her husband's death and daughter's illness is so overly calculated. Each moment of insightfulness and charm was just overruled by a cold, calculation that in a lot of ways appeared to lack sincerity.

Now, she talks about this compartmentalizing nature of the brain to deal with grief. With a loss of time and meaning. How logic kicks in and tricks reality because it has to. Perhaps writing this piece was what she needed to do to reconnect her own constructed reality with the more temporal and corporeal reality.

I wanted it to be as good as the interview. I suppose she could be more candid in speech, even though she is a writer. I heard once that her technique is to rewrite everything she has written in a piece over again at the start of each day before adding to it or editing it. It would explain a lot about this piece and the spinning of time and yarn that never has much trajectory but reviews and revisits in different shades of meaning.

Kudos? Sure. National Book Award? Not on my watch.

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen

I can't remember the specifics of the Jeopardy clue, but it grabbed my attention: "This 19th century play by a Norwegian featured the psychological struggle of an intellectual as she navigates between her new academic husband and a mysterious man of her ambitious past, all ending in suicide" and the chime in of Hedda Gabler caused my brain to make mental note as a small, surprised gasp of air left my lips.

Since that moment, I made a special point to revisit Ibsen after all these years. I read A Doll's House in high school and though it didn't leave a bad taste in my mouth, it wasn't particularly memorable either. This was redemption, I thought. A resurgence of my ancestry in works of art that I can now appreciate. I picked up a used copy of Ibsen's plays containing Hedda Gabler and began it with great anticipation.



Redemption didn't last long and I soon remembered Ibsen remarkably as I had 12 years ago. Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance since I was reeling from the Jeopardy build-up the way teenagers do summer blockbuster movies. Is she miserable yet? When does the affair get revealed? Is she breaking down? When is the suicide?

Are we there yet?

I was mostly overwhelmed by the over-theatricality of the thing. Look, I know it's a drama and I'm a prose scholar, but there was something particularly overly projected and calculated that made it difficult to become invested in. It's sparse development made what little action that occurred jarring and a bit vacant. In addition to that, there was very little detail to the characters that I needed to carry me through the plot points.

It seemingly missed the style of the time, the mystery and intellectual prowess of Austen or Wilde's women and left Hedda no more than a hollow frame of a woman with some kind of intellect that is never demonstrated or founded apart from minute mentions of it with Ejlert.

I wanted the drama, the tempestuous struggle between former lovers and sordid pasts. I wanted her to navigate between the men, to assume her power as a woman and have some sense of self rather than be a sketch of a wife and former lover, a pinball character who never departs or arrives in any act. No real past or future.

But perhaps that's the point Ibsen is trying to make. Domestic purgatory, anyone?

People say Hedda is like a female Hamlet. I don't know. She doesn't expose any depth, any real sense of autonomy besides allowing people to sit and talk with one another, and though Ibsen suggests these things, she never really gets things moving the way Hamlet did with the death of Polonius, The Mousetrap or the duel with Laertes. That's more than a difference of power between men and women, methinks.

Or maybe it was just lost on me. But damnit, I'm Norwegian. It should be in my blood. Guess I'll go on eating my lefse and avoiding holiday Lutefisk with the love and admiration of a cultural significance I understand.